RE: [Group Etiquette]

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com>]

>>>>> "Jonathan" == Jonathan Shore <jshore@example.com> writes:

    Jonathan> I've been down the academic path before - I understand
    Jonathan> the issues and the fervor of open source advocates.

Well, if so, I would really appreciate continuing the discussion
(offline if you prefer).  I must be missing something, because I
_really_ don't understand where you're coming from.

    Jonathan> Sometimes it just gets in the way of getting the job
    Jonathan> done, IMHO.

Define "job."  AFAICT, the only necessary running cost to open
sourcing a project that your accountants will notice is maintenance of
a web server.  This is not necessarily cheap or trivial; but let's
assume it is:

just add

tar xzf \
    /home/www/open-source/$PROJECT/$PROJECT-`date +"%Y%m%d"`.tar.gz \
    /var/devel/$PROJECT

to your weekly crontab, and

tar xzf \
    /home/www/open-source/$PROJECT/$PROJECT-$VERSION.tar.gz \
    /var/devel/$PROJECT

to your release script, no?  (An extreme form of the cathedral model.)
The real costs are economic (lost revenue from giving up your
monopoly).

Sure, you'll have to manage gratuitous patch submissions.  I'm crying
for you....  As for non-patch mail, you can borrow Kyle Jones's
patch-bot from XEmacs; it returns all mail that doesn't contain a
patch.  ;-)

    Jonathan> Managing a distributed Open Source project is hard
                         ^^^^^^^^^^^

But nobody is suggesting that.  "If you love something, set it free.
If you're lucky, it will mature, move to Timbuktu, and never need your
support again.  If it comes back wanting money, call the police."  :-)

If you're very lucky, somebody may grab the ball and run that
distributed open source project for you, and you'll get the benefits.
Apache and the Solaris-cum-Linux-driver situations are instructive
examples, although they originated in the open source communities and
the corporations latched on later.

Sure, people bitch about cathedral-model projects, and projects that
don't provide support.  So?  These people are not paying customers;
how much can it hurt?

So what is this downside you are talking about?

-- 
University of Tsukuba                Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences       Tel/fax: +81 (298) 53-5091
_________________  _________________  _________________  _________________
What are those straight lines for?  "XEmacs rules."